This article explores the urban sketches found in the diaries, travel writings, and essays of twentieth-century French writer Julien Green, with a particular focus on the poetic and cultural imagination embedded in his representations of the city. The study analyzes Green’s depiction of urban space on three levels. First, the city is presented as a concrete geographical landscape as well as a poetic space (espace poétique), intimately linked to the subject’s perception, memory, and emotion. Second, the city is conceived as a site of collective human activity and historical memory, bearing the traces of past lives and a layered palimpsest of cultural heritage, thereby embodying the multiplicity of public life and cultural experience. Finally, the city emerges as a symbolic space that stimulates dreams, memories, and imagination, revealing deeply personal and spiritual projections. Through these three analytical perspectives, this article seeks to uncover the multilayered meanings of the city in Green’s writing and to examine the connections between his urban representations and the broader rise of travel literature at the end of the twentieth century. Green’s travel writing reveals the subtle perceptions and historical resonances concealed beneath the surface of the city, demonstrating a keen sensitivity to its cultural depth. The city, in Green’s vision, is not merely a physical space, but a cultural text that combines humanist concerns with a cosmopolitan openness, reflecting a spirit of inclusivity and intellectual breadth.
